{ Islam from inside }

Sept 11

Added Sept 11, 2003

This is a brief
piece written on Sept 13, 2001 and published in the Ottawa Citizen.

Sometimes the world you know slips away from the range of your
vision and a terrible, alternate reality materializes in front of your
eyes, displacing the familiar and the known with a strange and
unwelcome universe. A sense of mental slippage, a sliding away of all
established comfort and assurance accompanied the images of massive
passenger airliners slamming their enormous bulk with bullet like
velocity into the twin towers that overlooked New York city. As the
rescue operations mounted and as the news and images of
people fleeing the towers unrolled, there was still some slight
possibility of absorbing and dealing with the tragedy. But then the
twin towers collapsed, one after another, subsiding slowly into dust
and rubble like a colossus fallen in battle, buckling under dreadful
wounds. At that moment the known world faded from view and an alternate
universe of terrible possibility emerged.

As the towers crumbled it was as if reason itself sank and subsided,
obscured by the smoke and dust of the ruins. With the disintegration of
the towers came a horror, a numbness, a dismantling of the mental
capacity to register the material and human scope of the disaster. My
wife was in tears, my children were stunned by the images - all of us
were silent. What was there to say at a time like this unless it be
words that would bring relief to the injured and comfort to the
bereaved? Any other talk would be mere speculation, uninformed opinion,
insensitive jabber.

We have been stunned into tears and silence by world events many times
in the preceding years - but never, in recent times, has such an
intense human-created calamity been visited on North American soil.
Before this, we wept when we saw the images of endless lines of Iraqi
civilian refugees fleeing on foot over mountains after they were left
to Saddam's "mercy" following the first Gulf War. We wept when the
rebels in
the southern marshes of Iraq were set upon by Saddam. We wept at the
half-million children dead as a result of sanctions against Iraq. We
wept at the dreadful
massacres and devastations carried out against Palestinian refugee
camps in Lebanon. We wept at the plight of Afghan's swept away before
the (American supported) Taliban's merciless advance. We wept for
calamity upon calamity.

Those were long drawn out sufferings taking months and years to unfold,
reworking the victims lives, their minds, their humanity as they
struggled to survive in, and adapt to, a world where people can visit
such misfortune on one another, where power and 'interests' repeatedly
eclipse compassion, humanity, and justice.

In a way, we have become accustomed to tears - reluctant witnesses to
unnecessary suffering - while we ourselves (in North America)
have blessedly been spared such suffering. But now, with frightening
suddenness, ballistic speed, and fearful brutality, suffering has come
"here" - with such force that hearts are crushed by the horror of this
human-inflicted tragedy.

Human emotion can only cope with so much before the mind starts to seek
out ways to divert suffering, to alleviate it, to end it, to correct
it, to avenge it, to seek out and target the source of the suffering.
It is at that moment that terrible potential emerges. Reality passes
through a threshold of perception from which there may never be a clean
return to the past. Reason itself tragically sinks and subsides into
the dust of the ruins. Anger, like a missile with damaged radar,
erratically but determinedly seeks out a target.

Suffering is a potent fuel, and like others, the political engine of
the United
States now has an abundance of that unfortunate energy source. In such
a situation the potential for political manipulation is great. In a
climate of hurt, injury, and outrage, the impulse for revenge can
obscure moral principles and justice. But however much one may wish it
to be otherwise, vengeance does not equal justice. Justice calls to
impartiality, fidelity, and the upholding of all rights and dues even
if against one's own interests or desires. In this world it is a scarce
commodity.

We are sliding swiftly towards an indeterminate future charged with
multiple potentials, multiple possibilities. Peaceful and nightmarish
outcomes exist as contingencies, unrealized until we choose the path of
travel and thereby select the desired destiny.

As the United States seeks out and deals with the perpetrators of this
crime, it could follow no nobler advice than that given by president
James Garfield, when he said; "For vengeance I
would do nothing. This nation is too great to look for mere revenge".
Let punishment fall upon the guilty, but let it fall discriminatingly,
with justice, and not tainted with the spectre of power, political
interests, or revenge. To seek justice and equity in world affairs is a
momentous and difficult undertaking, a great task for a nation that
seeks a great destiny. To seek vengeance or war, to use this tragedy as
an excuse for achieving a political or strategic agenda, is a short and
easy
road to filling the world with many more whose lives are shaped by
grief and tears, and whose hearts are wrapped in a veil of suffering.

- Irshaad Hussain

Political Discourse

There was the sudden narrowing of the eyes as he spoke about the
terrorists and their evil actions, the slight smile as he enunciated
America's greatness, and the furrowing of the brow as he decried the
grave threat to freedom - then with a final dramatic assertion of
America's assured victory, George Bush concluded his speech. I
experienced a strong feeling of deja view. It was as if
this speech was only a recasting of the previous ones, as if the
President had only one simple message to deliver to his people and that
message was to be repeated and looped time and again, with only minor
variations in its theme. The sentiments he expressed seemed unfeigned,
the determination genuinely felt, yet with each emerging statement,
each dramatic turn of phrase, each narrowing of his eyes, my sense of
the solidity, trustworthiness, and maturity of the political world
displayed in front of me seemed to slip away as if into an obscuring
haze.

This sense of slippage began early in the crisis, and has accelerated
with each passing month and each Presidential broadcast, until it now
appears as if America has slid unawares into a comic book world where
all talk and all action is painted larger than life, both in its
melodramatic
theatricality and in its potentially fearsome consequences.

While refugees fled the bombing in Afghanistan, a different type of
bombing campaign was underway in America. This campaign's weapon
delivery system was political language, and its destructive payload was
the emotive terminology, legislation, and phraseology used to define
and target the terrorist threat. Together they were used to clear
the ground of public resistance to the war and to the politically messy
actions that unfolded as the war widened to include other strategic
targets. It's a transformation that
began gradually, with false starts, even some major terminological
fumbles (such as the ludicrous names given to military campaigns) but
gradually begun to take on a mantle of firmness, authority,
and vigorously pursued and forcefully enunciated policy.

It is not surprising that with the horrendous erasure of the trade
centre towers an overpowering sense of crisis and imminent danger took
hold of American society. The events were so sudden and so
dramatic in scope that few questioned the overwrought and emotionally
charged language of America's response to the events. But as time
passes it is starting to appear as if the whole field of public
political discourse and the relationship of government and citizenry
has been injected with a current of emotion that deflects critical
thought and substitutes simplified platitudes in place of truly
informative content. The official statements and speeches emerging from
the white house sometimes seem pitched at the cerebral level of the
speech balloons that appear over the heads of comic book heros as they
confront caricatured enemies.

But it may be that there is a clever and effective art behind this
almost pabular level of public discourse. At a time of anxiety and
fear, people traditionally reach towards religion or government to seek
comfort, direction, and relief from apprehension. But in a society that
is primarily secular, religion and religious institutions are largely
devoid of any material power to physically protect or safeguard from
danger or to advise a course of political action. So government takes
on the role of a protecting, guiding, and rallying figure that has both
the authority and the apparent wisdom to select the best course of
action. It will relieve the fears and anxieties that the citizens
cannot handle, it will turn aside ideological evils and safeguard the
people from dangerous external threats and covert, hidden internal
threats, and it will rally the nation to battle the foe.

The government takes on the role of protecting parent or concerned
guardian, and just as with a child, the language of public discourse is
simplified - reduced to protective, patriotic, and emotional statements
directed towards its own citizenry and aggressive statements of power
and punishment directed towards the enemy and their way of thought and
feeling. But both the internally and externally directed statements
serve a clear purpose - to shape the manner in which the world is
perceived and understood by the American people.

Through a simple (almost simplistic) but strongly stated political
language, the parameters, the boundaries, and the nature of the
political playing field is generated. In a time of crisis, political
language seeks to shape perceptions of reality and it is through the
definitions, characterizations, and emotional coloring of this language
that events are interpreted, explained, and experienced. Just as
symbolic religious language gives meaning to the world, so also the
political language of the government seeks to present a filter through
which people view the world and react to unfolding events. To the
extent that this language is adopted, accepted, and disseminated by the
media and absorbed by the average citizen, it becomes an instrument in
defining the role and shaping the response of the general public. In
this way the language of government in times of crisis acquires a force
and potency that can equal or even surpass the power of religious
language. People give themselves over to the worldview defined by these
politically generated filters with a level of passion, acceptance, and
devotion that even religious faith within a secular society does not
claim from them.

It is as if strategic secular politics has acquired the life and power
once commanded only by religion and its acolytes. Now, as America lays
out the course of its "war against terror", it's secular priesthood
calls for faith
instead of questioning, belief in the righteousness of America instead
of reflection about past actions and present aims, trust instead of
investigation, and acceptance of the course set instead of
contemplation of alternative options. Those who are true servants to
this simplistic secular faith are held up as saintly examples, while
those who dissent or protest are chided as immature or irresponsible
for disturbing and endangering the difficult quest which the nation has
undertaken. It is doubtful that any religious institution in America
could command the degree of submission that
the secular strategic politics of America commands.

In a speech given during the war in Afghanistan, with an
emotional, almost glowing expression of pride on his face, George Bush
read a line from a letter he received from a 4th grade girl. "As much
as I don't want my dad to fight," she wrote, "I'm willing to give him
to you." Now some of us - unbelievers in the ideology and strategic
goals underlying the deepening commitment to long term war, are not so
willing to give ourselves to President Bush and his
mission. We are doubtful of the wisdom of the messianic front man for
the war against terror. A clear lesson that even the most negligent
student can
derive from a cursory reading of history is this: When someone states
there is no alternative path - only his way or the enemy's way -
be suspicious of his motives, be suspicious of his methods, be
suspicious of his goals, and carefully check out all the alternatives
he does not want you to choose. Otherwise, sacrifices you may not want
to make may be forcefully taken from you for the sake of questionable
political and strategic gain.